Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (19 page)

I poke my head through the mosquito netting, then the tent flap.

Coming down the hillside is a very expensive Mercedes all-terrain vehicle. And gripping the wildly lurching wheel is none other than Teddy Neiderbaum.

FUUUUUCK!

When he sees me, an array of white teeth glint from ear to ear. I know I’m about to be screwed twelve ways to Sunday. I should have listened to the alarms ringing in my subconscious, retrieved the .38 pistol from under my pillow and put the asswipe out of business. Instead, as Neiderbaum climbs out of the still rocking vehicle, I say: “What the hell are you doing here?”

We circle each other like strutting fighting cocks looking for an opening.

“I told you I might show up. My other plans for the summer went to Hell in a hand basket. Anyway, I haven’t been on a dig in years. Need to get back in shape.”

Suddenly the door of the latrine bangs open. Fawn walks toward us, looking fresh as a daisy.

“Professor Neiderbaum. What a surprise.”

“Teddy. It’s Teddy. Came down to give Alex a hand. Beneficiary of my years of experience. Brought a case of 10-year-old Canadian whiskey too. Box of Cohibas. Do you smoke cigars, Miss…?”

“Fawn.”

“Miss Fawn?”

“Just Fawn.” She spits a bullet of tobacco juice into the dirt half an inch in front of Neiderbaum’s ostrich-skin cowboy boots.

Neiderbaum is a big man, a fact I never fully appreciated before. 6-3. Face like a bulldog on steroids. Barrel chest. Arms thick as smoked Virginia hams. Eyes seething with quicksilver emotions.

For the rest of the morning, he works like seven devils hauling wheelbarrows full of rock and gravel from the dry streambed to a slight rise opposite our campsite, constructing a stone platform on which he pitches his tent.

I’m sitting in my canvas chair drinking
mescal
sunrises and wondering what the hell Neiderbaum’s really doing here.

I throw Fawn an ironic glance, but she remains distant and unresponsive as she goes about her camp chores. She looks sumptuous in short shorts and a fitted linen safari shirt.

After lunch we take Neiderbaum to the excavation. He is appropriately dazzled by our discovery, teetering like a drunk from painted panel to painted panel, gaping at the panoply of Mayan perversions revealed by the beam of his flashlight.

Then Neiderbaum makes his own discovery: in one corner a low narrow doorway obscured by a cave-in of stone and sand. Grabbing shovels we clear away the debris.

On the other side is a small airless room with rows of shallow niches running down two sides. Each niche contains its own special accoutrements. Ceremonial rattles, obsidian knives, incense burners, weed pipes, stone animal totems and fired-clay figurines, and a hundred and one other pieces of Mayan ceremonial
tsatske
. It’s the storage closet of the high priests of Zetehux.

Unbelievably a giant phallus, five feet long, eighteen inches in girth, leans nonchalantly against the room’s back wall. Its details are spare, the work of some avant-garde minimalist who lived a thousand years ago. Yet it’s unmistakably a dick, painted a lurid red color.

Close up it turns out to be carved out of wood, with a hollow interior. Easy to move. At Neiderbaum’s insistence he and I lug it into the main room. Fawn goes into hysterics, slapping her knees, falling to the floor where she rolls from side to side gasping for breath. Finally she recovers from her giggle fit, only to catch sight of the twelve-inch marble dildo Neiderbaum found in the storeroom and thrust into the pocket of his cargo shorts.

“Is that a banana in your pocket?” Fawn asks, breaking into fresh howls of laughter.

We carry the big wooden dick out into the open air. Dark rain-heavy clouds torment the heavens. Neiderbaum’s pupils have shrunk to shimmering black currents behind which madness dances. His lips are caked with dried spittle. When he thinks I’m not looking, he mutters gibberish to himself. Is he on drugs? Suffering from sunstroke? Going insane? But he is Vice Chair of the Department, so I don’t make a fuss.

“What are we doing with this?” I ask, indicating the gargantuan prick.

“Taking it over by my tent, so I can examine it later.”

I flip my head skyward.

“Better put it under the clubhouse fly. You don’t want the paint to wash off when it rains.”

We end up putting it in Neiderbaum’s tent.

Exhausted by all this activity, I collapse to the ground. My shirt is completely sweated through. Fresh blisters on each hand throb and ooze. My head is pounding from the pressure of the incoming tropical depression.

Neiderbaum pours Crown Royal into a pair of glasses. But I can’t drink it. Next moment I’m on my knees retching bile into the dirt. I hope I’m not coming down with the same bug ravaging Mary Beth’s interiors.

“I need to lie down,” I say. “Take a nap.”

“Up all night tomcatting?” asks Neiderbaum.

I don’t bother to reply. Neiderbaum heads back to the excavation. I take four aspirin and a sleeping tablet and sack out.

The waterfall of Fawn’s laughter draws me awake. She and Neiderbaum are having drinks in the clubhouse. Her safari blouse is nonchalantly disheveled. One of her legs rests sideways across the arm of her camp chair. Neiderbaum’s fingers trip the light fantastic across the bare stage of her thigh.

Rage and jealousy savage my brain like ravenous wild dogs gnawing a corpse. Have they been getting it on down at the excavation? How could Fawn betray me like this? I’ll castrate Neiderbaum and mail his balls to the Smithsonian!

Tamping down my chaotic emotions, I stroll nonchalantly over to the clubhouse.

“Anyone for dinner?” I ask.

A month-old sports section from the Caribbean edition of the
Miami He
rald and an open can of peanuts form two-thirds of an odd tableau on the tabletop. My Marine Corp ashtray, in which two fat Cohibas smolder like burning turds, constitutes the final element of this inanimate melodrama.

“There’s some baked beans sitting in a saucepan on my Coleman stove,” Neiderbaum says. “Add a can of cocktail franks, reheat and you’re golden.”

“Golden?”

“Oh, please,” Fawn says. “Don’t start.”

I jerk her to her feet; pull her against me.

“What about last night? Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“Get a life, Alex.”

Neiderbaum leaps up and with a baroque flourish presses the barrel of a pistol to my head. My brain spins like flushed water in a toilet bowl. The situation is completely and irrevocably out of control!

“About those beans and franks,” Neiderbaum says.

I release Fawn. She picks up the limp sports section of the
Miami Herald
and slaps it back and forth across my face. Then she turns and walks toward Neiderbaum’s tent. Jumbo drops of rain plummet from the sky. Moments later it becomes a raging downpour.

“Night,” Teddy says. His testosterone bulk, an evil troll from a Grimm’s fairy tale, splashes across the clearing.

I’m left with the peanuts and a half empty bottle of Crown Royal. I feel an inescapable need to kill someone.

Watching them fuck behind the veil of the tent wall is both a turn-on and a hugely deflating bummer. I remain transfixed until Fawn screams for the third time and kicks over the white gas lantern. With a tinkle of broken glass, Neiderbaum’s tent turns pitch black.

The pouring rain of the storm despoils the night. My forehead throbs with fever, sweat dripping like 3-in-1 oil down my neck and chest. It feels as if someone’s red-hot fingertips are searing into my shoulders.

I need to go back to sleep. Knit up the raveled sleeve of care. There’ll be plenty of time to shoot Neiderbaum in the morning.

The sound of drums roots around in my head like a pig searching for truffles and at last nudges me awake.

Drums?! You must be shitting me. It’s the fever.

But it is indeed drums. Two to be exact, calling and answering each other in deep somnambulistic tones.

When I poke my head outside the tent, the sun is burning the edges of some feathery clouds, the remnants of last night’s storm. The effect is like grilled cheese sandwiches sliced open with a filleting knife. The beat of the drums intensifies.

A crowd of straw-hatted and shawled peasants stands in front of Neiderbaum’s tent on its raised platform of stone and gravel. The crowd sways left and right to the rhythm of the drums. Among the gathered flock I see at least two men from our excavation crew.

As the light thickens, the wooden cock becomes apparent, rising like a giant’s middle finger in front of Neiderbaum’s tent.

In the next instant, Neiderbaum, entirely nude, steps from the tent just as the sun breaks like a burning wave over the jungle canopy and sweeps across the shadowy slash and burn clearing where we’re camped. Neiderbaum’s tanned flesh turns to burnished gold. Half his face is painted a sickly green color, the other half bleached flour white. His eyes burn as brightly as blood diamonds caught in the white-hot glare of an arc lamp.

A leather harness encircles Neiderbaum’s buttocks like a spider its prey. This contraption holds in full erectile display the marble dildo that had sent Fawn into hysterics the day before.

My mind reels. What is going on here? It’s as if I’ve stumbled onto the set for a Tarzan remake directed by Larry Flint.

Then Fawn appears, draped in a blood-orange robe that glints in the sunlight. A pair of loin-clothed acolytes draw her toward a wooden bench in front of Neiderbaum. She stumbles, sways, rolls her eyes. She must be drugged to the gills.

Her robe falls away. Stark naked she is guided to the bench, where she sits, then rolls onto her back. A patchwork of black and red Mayan glyphs have been painted on her body, defiling the perfection of her flesh.

Neiderbaum and the whole bunch of them are totally bonkers! Seduced by a dark spell emanating from the room beneath the ruined pyramid. Caught in some Mayan black juju. And Fawn is their sacrificial victim.

No fuckin’ way, pal!

I wave my .38 revolver in the air.

“Stop!” I shout.

The drums cease. All eyes turn toward me.

“Alex,” Neiderbaum says. “What a surprise.”

“Let her go.”

I walk through the crowd, which separates in front of me like flesh beneath a surgeon’s blade, and step up onto the stone and gravel platform. I look out upon the faces of the surly peasants.

“The show’s over,” I say. “Everybody go home.”

Neiderbaum pushes me sideways. We stand facing each other.

“You don’t understand,” he says. “What you’ve discovered here at Zetehux is the doorway to a new world order in which there are no limits, no boundaries.”

I’m holding the revolver; Neiderbaum grips an obsidian sacrificial knife. Our eyes are locked in cold fury, but neither of us is prepared to make the fateful first move.

With a Herculean effort of will, I break out of the Mexican standoff.

Die, asshole!

My finger curls around the trigger and pulls it back. But the firing pin clicks on an empty chamber. I’ve forgotten to load the fucking weapon.

Neiderbaum lunges with the knife.

We struggle, teetering wildly back and forth, a ganglia of intertwined arms and legs. Somehow my hand encircles the marble dildo. Its harness gives way and the phallus comes free. Even as his teeth sink into the muscle of my shoulder, I bring the striated stone schlong crashing down again and again on Neiderbaum’s skull. Bone and brains transmogrify into pulp. Neiderbaum’s teeth release their grip. He groans; crumples to the ground. Rivulets of blood cover my hand and forearm.

A cry of dismay rises from the crowd of peasants. Then a great stillness descends, as though a Victorian bell jar has been lowered over the clearing.

But the sharp scent of danger snakes up my nose like ammonia arising from a broken ampule. This is no time to take a break and consider the existential dilemma of my sorry-assed existence.

Fawn stands; stumbles toward me, hands outstretched like a sleepwalker. For a moment I think I see Mary Beth and Chip among the crowd of peasants. Then I realize
it’s their heads impaled on wooden spikes, bobbing up and down as the crowd equivocates. Am I hallucinating?

A swarm of peasants bent on revenge rush toward the dais, their faces distorted by rage.

“Don’t leave me behind,” Fawn begs.

For a moment I think:
Sorry, baby. You should have thought twice before you betrayed me for Neiderbaum. You’re on your own
. Then I have a change of heart.

Scooping Fawn up in my arms, I turn and sprint toward Neiderbaum’s Mercedes parked a dozen feet away behind his tent. She’s as light as a Styrofoam casket. Just as I reach the vehicle, the forefront of the crowd pours like a flood over the stone platform.

As I clamber into the driver’s seat, a stone strikes me behind the ear. My fingers touch the wound, feel the warm rush of blood. A larger stone slams into the back window; a web of cracks spreading from its epicenter. Fawn curls in a ball on the passenger side.

When I yank down the sun visor, Neiderbaum’s keys tumble into my hand. The gods are with us!

The engine turns over on the first try. I blast out of there with a spray of gravel and mud. The air-conditioning flips on automatically, chilling me to the bone.

Five miles down the road I arrive at a four corners. A hand-painted sign in front of a tumbledown shack offers beer and
tacos al carbon
. On the front veranda a woman lolls in a hammock nursing a baby.

An ancient and dilapidated
autobus
is stopped in front of the
taqueria
while the driver is off in the bush taking a piss or a snort of coke. Two boys offer an iguana for sale to the passengers. They walk back and forth beside the bus, holding their prize aloft to the array of open or missing windows. A desperate Indian woman dressed in black hawks slices of pineapple and mango dusted with chili powder to the bus travelers. Armed with a machine gun, a soldier guarding the crossroads gazes at the passing scene with a worried expression.

Sitting in the stationary SUV taking all this in, I realize my hands are shaking uncontrollably, overcome by palsy. Swirls and droplets of dried blood cover them. Neiderbaum is dead. Mary Beth and Chip too. All dead. The beat of the drums pounds relentlessly in my head like the undecipherable thoughts of an idiot savant. But I know one thing for sure. One thing.